Some 4,000 years ago a people called Nesi or Nesites conquered a people called Hatti. The Nesites established their capital in a Hatti site called Hattusas. Historians called the Nesites Hittites and the name has stuck.

The inhabitants of the island of Crete constructed a flourishing civilization that might have been a thalassocracy or sea-empire. No one knew of this civilization until the British archaeologist Arthur Evans excavated ruins in a property he bought for that purpose. Today's archaeologists are wont to belittle literary or documentary sources. It wasn't so in the late 19 th and early 20 th century and, even as he dug assiduously uncovering foundations and even standing chambers, Evans was conscious of the Greek legend of the Minotaur, a frightening beast half-man half-bull who met his match in Theseus. The king of Crete then was Minos and the Minotaur was confined to a labyrinth as long as he was fed human victims. The palace that Evans excavated at Knossos had so many chambers and passageways that it resembled a maze and its discoverer decided that Crete and whatever island domains it possessed or were affiliated to it should be called the Minoan Civilization. The Minoans had a rudimentary system of writing that no one has deciphered, so what they called themselves is a mystery so far unsolved. But for sure it wasn't Minoans.

The Bulgars were Turks from southern Russia who invaded the Balkans down to the gates of Constantinople in the 7 th century. To get there they had to slay a lot of Slavs and lord it over those they did not kill. The Bulgars were so thoroughly slavicized by their subjects that they forgot their own language. No one knows what the original inhabitants of Bulgaria called themselves. Today the majority of Macedonians consider themselves linguistically Bulgarian, which means that they bear a Greek name but claim a remote affinity with a people whose language was swallowed by time centuries ago.

The Prussians got their name from a land they conquered with blood and iron

Another remarkably incongruous misnomer involved the Borussians. These were a Baltic people, related to Lithuanians and Latvians. During the great drive to the east of the Germans after the formation of the Holy Roman Empire in the 10 th century, an enterprise undertaken in the name of Christianity, the Borussians proved fractious. Balts in general appear to have had this trait and Lithuanians did not abandon paganism until the 15 th century, when their land was united to Christian Poland. In the case of the Borussians, the resistance was ferocious and historians believe that they might have been hounded to extinction. As they say, gone but not forgotten, and the German conquerors of the Borussians became known as Prussians.

The area called Prussia was originally south of Lithuania almost entirely surrounded by Poland. When Brandenburg, which was only a duchy,  was casting about for a kingly name it chose that of Prussia, which it had annexed. Prussia became the core of Germany during the 19 th century. Thus extinct Balts gave a name to perhaps the most militaristic state in history. The Soviets abolished Prussia when they conquered eastern Germany during World War II. What remained of German Prussia reverted to calling itself Brandenburg.

During the great period of Middle English, which is a language modern English-speakers cannot read without a dictionary, Englishmen took to calling Dutch or Dutchmen the people of the Netherlands. The language of the Netherlands is a member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It was called Diutisc, which, like Middle English, is incomprehensible to modern Dutchmen. Dutch suggests Deutsch. which is what Germans call their own language. However, a Dutchman is not a German and Dutchmen have never considered themselves Germans. If you ask a Dutchman why, then, they are called Dutch, he will most likely shrug his shoulders and say something like: “Search me. It's only the English that call us Dutch.”

When Columbus set sail to reach India across the Atlantic ocean, he discovered the Antilles and the South and Central American terrae firmae. Columbus was not about to concede that he had not arrived in India at all but in another continent. His discovery was more momentous for Europeans than the Portuguese arrival in the real India. The Portuguese were probably laughing up their sleeves at Columbus' pertinacity, but the great Genoese navigator had his way and the peoples he met during his exploratory voyages were named Indians, and Indians they have remained. American Indians would no more give up their name than Americans their. "American natives" is now often used, but it has a connotation of backwardness. As other native Americans in the tribal stage today do not care what they are called, the word Amerindians is a perfectly good name for the pre-Columbian inhabitants of America.

Incidentally, Latin Americans use to complain that Americans had usurped a name that belonged to all of them. But they were wrong and have mostly stopped griping. The citizens of the United States of America have every right in the world to call themselves Americans and their country America, because that is exactly what they are. The citizens of the United States of Brazil or of the Republic of Argentina have no claim on being called specifically Americans. They are officially Brazilians and Argentines because those are the names they themselves chose. They could have a point only if they had named their countries, say, the United States of Brazil in America or the American Republic of Argentina. But ultimately they didn't really much mind if they were not called Americans by Europeans. It is probably the Spaniards with their former habit of calling their former colonials Americans who were at the source of the complaint, but it was really none of their business.

Most misnomers have survived the test of time but not Yugoslavia

Another misnomer of the discovery of America was Venezuela. The name was first used by the Amerigo Vespucci who also named America. During a voyage captained by Alonso de Ojeda around 1500, he saw in a gulf (to this day wrongly designated lake Maracaibo) tribes of Amerindians living in huts built on piles. Apart from immodest, Vespucci must have been a great one for a lark and, alleging that the water-villages he saw had some similiarity to Venice, he designated them “Little Venice” or Venezuela in Spanish. The name later spread to the entire country. That Vespucci must have been joking is apparent in that the suffix “zuela” in Spanish has the implication of something insignificant. Venezuelans, however, have never felt that their name was an aspersion.

Rather than a misnomer Belgium, the land of the Belgians, was a political compromise. What today constitutes the country of Belgium was ceded to the Netherlands in the 1815 post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna. There were inherent problems with this arrangement. Demographically at the time, more than half the Belgians spoke French. The other Belgians, the ones in Flanders, spoke Dutch but they were fervent Catholics and more than half of Dutchmen were Calvinists. The French speakers are often called Walloons, which is also a misnomer because Waloon is like French but not strictly speaking French and the Belgians who speak French speak the same language as that of France. One thing led to another and both Flemish or Flamands and Waloons or French-speakers wanted to be independent of the Netherlands. This came about in 1830. But what to call their country? Neither Flanders nor Walloonia would do. According to Julius Caesar, there existed in part of modern Belgium a Celtic tribe called the Belgii. As neither Dutch nor French speakers could claim descent from Celts, Belgium or the land of the Belgii, who had disappeared ages ago, was a name acceptable to all the parties.

The French-speaking Belgians have never complained about the name but the Flemish, whose province has a history as long as that of any country in Europe, have felt in the past to be discriminated. There were confrontations with the French-speakers until a compromise was made which converted Belgium into federation. In any event, today Belgium is at the heart of the European Union and they could very well be considered the first of the Europeans if and when all of Europe itself becomes federation.

Misnomers are not just a thing of the past. They are quite common in our times. Yugoslavia means the land of the southern Slavs. The name was invented out of whole cloth in 1918. Not all of Yugoslavia was in the southern Balkans and Yugoslavs themselves never considered themselves other than primarily what they were before Yugoslavia was founded, that is, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and so on. Most misnomers have survived the test of time. Yugoslavia did not.

Arabia is the homeland of the Arabs, at least as far back as 2000 BCE. Arabia was and is a huge desert everywhere, except on some fringes and mountainous areas. The concept of an Arabian state never entered any one's mind. Under the Ottomans, Arabia was the land that contained the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These were located in a province called Hejaz, but there were other regions of Arabia, all very lightly populated by nomads or Bedouins. From the region of the Nejd there was a movement for the unification of Arabia under one dynasty. With the defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, political-tribal contentions in Arabia became exacerbated. Basically, it came down to the rivalry between the Hashemite dynasty and the Saudi dynasty. The Hashemites had been allies of the Brtish during World War I. The Saudis had the backing of the fundamentalist Wahhabis. The Saudis beat the Hashemites and Arabia was integrated as Saudi Arabia. If it had been the other around, today we might have had Hashemite Arabia instead. Arabia is Arabia. Saudis is perhaps not strictly a misnomer, but properly speaking Saudis are basically Arabians.

Japanese imperialism at least got the name of Korea right

Israel is a notoriously contentious misnomer. The historical roots of modern Israel are in Zionism, a movement founded by the Austro-Hungarian Jew Theodor Herzl, who felt Jews were being ill-treated in Europe and proposed that they be given a land of their own. Herzl would have settled for a portion of Patagonia if that is what it took to create a Jewish state. The Argentines would hardly have considered this possibility, which Jews themselves would have contemned. The Stalinist USSR created a Jewish autonomous republic somewhere in the depths of Siberia, which is probably the only place in the world where you won't find one Jew. Before the creation of modern Israel, the future state was called the Jewish Agency. Zion was a possibility. Judah would have been more appropriate as it was the more legitimate of the successor states of David's kingdom, which itself was not built at all from Israel but from Judah. The Biblical Israel was in Samaria or what today is northern Israel or the land south of lake Tiberias. However, Israel was the collective name adopted by Jacob for Jews. In that sense, despite the fluctuations of history, the name Israel is not entirely inappropriate.

Korea was always known in the past by the names of its ruling dynasties. When in 1905 the Japanese annexed Korea, they retained for it the dynastic name of Chosen. But when the Japanese were defeated and the country was divided into two independent halves, Chosen in English was changed to Korea, which comes from Koryo, the name of an ancient Korean kingdom. Despite the illegitimacy of the Japanese occupation and Western usage, any Korean will tell you that his country is named Chosen or Choson and not Korea.

With the end of colonialism, many countries came into existence. Pakistan was a name invented for a part of British India and was adopted at the time of partition. Most ex-colonialist dependencies had names given to them by the colonialist powers. Some of these names were historically arbitrary, but they were retained anyway. Mauritania is phonetically the land of the Moors. Today's Mauritania does not coincide with the ancient country of Mauretania. There were Moors in Mauretania or Mauritania but they did not expand from there to Morocco but the other way around.

One country that was particularly unhappy about its colonial designation was the Gold Coast. When it became independent, its leadership cast about and revived the name of Ghana, an empire which had existed during the 10 th and 11 th centuries CE. The only problem was that ancient Ghana had not existed anywhere near modern Ghana. Those were days when third world was a designation that connoted international solidarity, so it was alright to jump geographical and historical boundaries. To avoid such misnaming, another country unhappy with its colonial name, Haute Volta (upper Volta river), simply invented Burkina Fasso, which means the land of the honest.